A black and white photograph of The Orrery Bar, originally published in 'Architecture and Building' in March 1955. Taken from the Design Council Archive held at the University of Brighton Design Archives.

Catalogue number: DCA-30-1-INT-CT-PE-56112. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives.

A major retrospective of the work of Habitat founder and serial design entrepreneur, Sir Terence Conran, opens on November 17 at the Design Museum in London and runs until 4 March 2012.

In his earlier life, Terence Conran was an assistant to display designer Natasha Kroll at Simpsons of Piccadilly, and later on his work was covered regularly in the Design Council’s journal ‘Design’.  He is therefore represented in various ways in the Design Archives, and one of our images has been used in the promotion of this new exhibition, The Way We Live Now.  The scope of the exhibition has been expanded by including not only work that was a source of inspiration to Conran, but also work that he commissioned.  In this way, it reveals much about the material culture of mid to late twentieth century Britain, and on into the twenty-first.